On the Fastrack

By Bill Holbrook

On the Fastrack chronicles the comic misadventures at Fastrack Inc., a wry mirror of the contemporary work scene. Ruthless boss Rose Trellis runs Fastrack, Inc. and thrives in an atmosphere of corporate political intrigue and back-stabbing. Readers can also follow the life of Fastrack worker Wendy Rommel and her husband, Art Welding, as they run the non-stop modern business gauntlet and juggle their home life with their children, Patina and Rusty.

On the Fastrack has been distributed by King Features Syndicate since 1984 and now appears in some 75 newspapers nationwide.

Bill Holbrook

Bill Holbrook was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and grew up in Huntsville, Ala., after his father was transferred to work in the space program. According to his mother, he started his career as an artist by drawing on the household walls.

Holbrook majored in Illustration and Visual Design at Auburn University in Alabama. He was the Art Director of the student newspaper, where he produced a weekly comic strip. He also did the paper's editorial cartoons and was published regularly in the Huntsville Times and the Monroe Journal. After graduation in 1980, Holbrook joined the Atlanta Constitution as an editorial staff artist. But his ambition remained to do a syndicated strip of his own.

During a 1982 visit to relatives on the West Coast, Holbrook was able to meet with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, who advised him to continually work on comic strip ideas, "weeding out the bad, keeping the good, rather than waiting for one big concept." Armed with that advice, Holbrook created a strip in the fall of that year about a college graduate working in a run-down diner. It did not stir syndicate interest, but what he learned on the strip helped the young cartoonist create his first winner, On the Fastrack, which was launched in syndication by King Features in 1984. There have been three anthologies of strips published.

In October 1989, Holbrook launched his second strip, Safe Havens. Initially about a day care center, this strip evolved into the adventures of Samantha Argus and her friends. King Features has distributed the comic since 1993.

In September 1995, Bill began a third strip called Kevin & Kell about a functional family of animals in a dysfunctional world. The strip is available online and also in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Holbrook lives in the Atlanta area with his wife and two daughters.

Wendy Welding

Wendy is the embattled yet optimistic executive assistant of Fastrack, Inc.'s CEO. In this position, she finds herself at the center of the company's maelstrom of weirdness, trying to find a balance between home vs. career, parenthood vs. sleep, and corporate loyalty vs. the urge to hurl her laptop through a plate glass window.

Art Welding

Art's major accomplishments in life are in winning the heart of his wife Wendy and being a caring father to Rusty and Patina. Other than that, he toils contentedly in the Fastrack, Inc. computer room year after year, free of ambition and its consequences.

Rusty

The children of Wendy and Art inhabit a virtual world that their parents are only dimly aware of.

Patina

In this online universe, they've battled The Bug (formerly known as Y2K), developed Santa's North Pole computer security system and cleaned up after their pet, Meg the Cyber-Dog.

Rose Trellis

Ms. Trellis is the cheerfully ruthless CEO of Fastrack, Inc., ruling the company with an iron hand, an unbending will and the ever-present threat of sending the staff on yet another "team-building" retreat. She has avoided the criminal excesses of most recent CEOs since she has always been able to grab everything she ever wanted legally.

Chelonia and Bud Spore

Chelonia and Bud run the computer network of the company. Chelonia is the daughter of Ms. Trellis, and their baby Cookie takes after her grandmother in every way except that she is too young yet to read Machiavelli.

The Moat Monster

Somewhere in the toxic chemical waste of the Fastrack, Inc. dump site, an organism spontaneously developed that grew to become the company's Chief of Security, with the ability to morph at will and the inability to tell a lie. As she was found to contain DNA fragments of the entire staff, she literally embodies the soul of the company.